126 "Well, darn, Ted, I just can't stay mad at you." . should have been done about the mem- bers of the nomenklatura, and what should be done with them in the future, was an authentic campaign issue-one on which the principal sides took iden- tifiably different positions. The term nomenklatura became a fairly elastic one. Originally, it had referred solely to the top managers of all the big enterprises and ministries-people who literally weren't allowed to hold such positions unless their names appeared on a Party-approved list of something under a hundred thousand people. Gradually, however, it took on a broader and broader meaning, and Walesa and others now use it to sug- gest a conf! uence of status, relative material prosperity, and a history of perceived collaboration of almost any sort with the prior regime. It could be seen as involving as many as two mil- lion people and their families, per haps as much as ten per cent of the country's population. Members of this group argue that to lump them all together indiscriminate- ly obscures the fact that there were tremendous divisions within the ruling class during the Communist era; that the only way to carry out certain kinds of social and economic activities that were necessary for the continuing functioning of the society as a whole (the construction of this bridge or that school, for example) was to coöperate with the authorities; and that there are nomenklaturas, so to speak, in every country-powerful leaders whose power derives in large part from their contacts with other leaders. The basic problem is that Poles do . not enter the transition on a level play- ing field. Proponents of a capitalist economy may claim that it offers every- one greater opportunities for advance- ment, but it's obvious that it offers the best such opportunities to those who start with greater material advantages or wider contacts or higher posi- tions. And in Poland those are in many cases the nomenklatura types, generally conceived-people who benefitted from theIr status under the earlier regime. Besides, there have been thousands of cases, during the period of transition, of managers' using their positions to pull off insider deals of one sort or another, such as selling off the choicest sections of their factories to joint-ven- ture investors from abroad at ridicu- lously reduced prices, quitting, and then turning up in the new private companies as senior officers with huge salaries. The sheer extent of that sort of chicanery turned many workers against the very notion of privatization; at many enterprises, privatization came to mean simply trading the state boss for a private boss who was the same person. Mazowiecki's government was slow to respond to scams of this sort in the beginning, though now laws have been passed in an effort to prevent them and there are fewer instances of the most blatant practices. Still, there is a tremendous amount of resentment against the nomenklatura among the people of Poland, a longing for a wider settling of accounts, and it was this longing that Walesa addressed with his promises of wholesale purges and rule by decree-what he took to calling "justice with an axe." DECEMBER 10, 1990 Adam Michnik was one of those who opposed this approach most strongly. "There was a certain price we paid for the process of leaving Com- munism without violence, without bloodshed, and part of it was that we would not engage in this sort of whole- sale vengeance," he told me. "In cases where laws have been broken-fine. Such people should be indicted and tried, the law should take its course. But we have to remain a nation of laws -that is of crucial importance. There is, beyond that, the question of qualified personnel. There are only so many competent and experienced people in this country. In many cases, they gained their competence and experi- ence through the work they were doing under the previous regime, and the victorious opposition has no one with similar experience and similar compe- tence to offer in their stead. In addition, for the sake of our future democratic order, the logic of revenge simply mustn't apply. We desperately need to take advantage of the best that every- body has to offer, and not exclude large numbers of otherwise skilled people because of their prior activities. We don't have that luxury. Finally-and perhaps this is the key point-hatred destroys not only those who are its targets but also, inevitably, those who do the hating. And we could easily end up destroying ourselves if we continue too far down that road." "What is he talking about-compe- tent?" one of Michnik's opponents on this issue asked me when I told him of Michnik's comments. "What compe- tence? These are the geniuses who got us into this mess. If they were so competent, why is- this country such a mess?" Bogdan Borusewicz, a promi- nent Gdansk activist, suggested that mere technical competence could be overrated as a leadership quality. "In our region," he said, "we've found that where managers have been changed things operate better, and there's less trouble, even when the new managers are less experienced, because they have more authority-and authority is what matters." As for the danger that things will get out of hand, Centrum's Jaroslaw Kaczynski told me that, Walesa's pop- ulist rhetoric notwithstanding, it would be only through the kind of program Centrum was proposing that a violent populist explosion could be forestalled.